Quote Originally Posted by Taunton Blue Genie View Post
Indeed. Most religions were founded when man had little concept of electricity, science, and a million other things that the average person these days understands. In the absence of knowledge (and the word 'science' mean knowledge) people were either ignorant about many subjects or assigned phenomena to unseen deities and spirits.
Believing in religion is essentially an intellectually childlike state and it is no co-incidence that almost every believer adopts the deity or deities passed on to them by local influences when they were children.
Homo sapiens* have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and religions have come and gone with empires, dominant tribes and the equivalent of evangelism. It is unlikely that any believers on this board would have held the same religious beliefs if they were born in a different location where another religion is dominant or in any era before Abrahamism took root.

As for the conflation of art, poetry and the like: yes, belief sysytems do inspire people and creative souls have always found work with the powers that be in any location. However, if I were to believe in little green men and paint a wonderful picture as a result of inspiration infused by the experience it doesn't mean that little green men exist - and someone else in a different location may assign that same inspiration to another deity. However, there are experiences in the mind of man (and all around the world) that are obviously common across all societies and it's more about other factors than little tin gods.

*At what state of evolution man was assigned a soul that could pass to the afterlife is another matter. Are there Cro-magnon and Neanderthal souls in your chosen afterlife/paradise/heaven?
Genie, you are generalising massively. You are entitled to your opinion, but you talk in such definitive terms about a subject that means different things to different people, and those people exercise their faith in many different ways. It's not as easy to suggest that everyone is wrong and you're 100% sure of it, it's a dangerous attitude to take. Plenty of religious people don't take what the good book says literally, how could they and why would they want to? Faith is a hugely complex subject. You may think it's all nonsense, that's fine, i'm no believer either, but to be dismissive is an insult to so many good people who have faith in my opinion.